COVID-19 Crisis Management in Newspaper Articles: A Diachronic Analysis

Abstract

Abstract The present study focuses on how the COVID-19 crisis was dealt with and represented in newspaper articles in the period January 2020-February 2022. To this end, a corpus of articles was compiled from the Times using Sketch Engine (https://www.sketchengine.eu/), in order to manage and investigate the corpus quantitatively; discourse and genre analyses were applied for the qualitative approach. After providing a definition of the coronavirus timespan and the term crisis, the paper explores how the language used changed over successive periods of crisis management and communication (Coombs 2010). It also shows how the unpredictable development of the pandemic had an effect on communication flows, which in turn affected how the crisis unfolded. Different types of information were conveyed through the media that played a crucial role in selecting what to convey (and what not to convey) to the readers and how to represent it. This significantly contributed (and continues to contribute) to the development of the readers’ opinions and sentiments, fuelling their worries and feelings of uncertainty, weakness and risk (Denti 2021; Wodak 2021). Future research will focus on metadiscursive features and the changes in rhetorical persuasion (Hyland 2005), and on the politicisation of the crisis (Musolff et al. 2022; Thielemann and Weiss 2023).